Warg

On a recent afternoon, in a practice room at the DiMenna Center for Classical Music, in midtown, Ramin Djawadi sat on a high stool, holding a baton, surrounded by thirty-one string musicians from the New York Philharmonic. Djawadi composes the music for the HBO dragons-and-intrigue drama “Game of Thrones.” The following night, in a coup de théâtre at the show’s fourth-season première, he would conduct the musicians as they played the “Game of Thrones” theme before a screening at Lincoln Center. Outside, on billboards and buses all over town, ads for the show said “ALL MEN MUST DIE.”

Djawadi, who is Iranian-German, conducts orchestras infrequently. He’d encouraged the musicians to offer suggestions. At times, the event’s concertmaster, Sheryl Staples, a violinist in a teal turtleneck sweater, seemed to be conducting him. “I was wondering if you want this to be sort of a two-bar idea here?” she said.

“You’re talking about—”

“When we all come in.” Staples played a passage on her violin—full and mournful—to demonstrate. “That way, we’re also saving something for the louder version in twenty-seven.”

“Very good,” Djawadi said. Staples sat down.

Djawadi raised his baton. Sumire Kudo, a young cellist, played the sombre first bars of “The Rains of Castamere,” a melody that, when heard during the Red Wedding scene, in one of last season’s final episodes, was the harbinger of a bloodbath that marked the near-total destruction of the Stark family, at the hands of their onetime allies the Freys and their enemies the Lannisters. Seven more cellos joined in, followed by basses, violas, and violins. Djawadi looked happy.

The fourteen-year-old actor Isaac Hempstead Wright sat in a chair, a few feet behind Djawadi. On the show, Wright plays Bran Stark, the family’s young son. At the beginning of the series, Bran, a fiercely cute boy with long bangs, lived in his family’s castle, climbing tower walls; now he’s a warg with greensight, travelling through snowy forests with wildlings and oddballs. (Long story.) Wright, too, is growing up. He wears Prada glasses; he’s into classical music and particle physics. On Twitter (handle: @IsaacBranFlakes), he posts things like “Off to the Proms at the RAH! Rach 3 and Tchaikovsky Symphony No. 5. Very excited!! :D.” It was his first visit to New York (“I have arrived in the Small Pear,” he tweeted), and he’d been invited to attend the Philharmonic rehearsal.

“Let’s play the main title one more time,” Djawadi said. The theme, another cello-heavy piece, accompanies the show’s opening sequence—camera swooping over a map of its setting, Westeros, animated by moving towers, armillary spheres, trees, gears, and ice.

“Wow!” Wright said when it was over. Djawadi thanked the musicians, and Wright signed some autographs for musicians’ kids: “For Tessa, Winter is coming!” “For Shawn, Starks rule!” (“Starks do rule,” he said later.)

Djawadi, nearby, was on a Philharmonic high. “It was amazing,” he said. “I would love to do more conducting.” Strings—synthesized strings—have been the show’s defining sound from the start, when David Benioff and D. B. Weiss, the showrunners, gave Djawadi a directive: no flutes. (Too medieval.) “The cello has become one of the main instruments in the show,” he went on. “It has a dark, rich sound. When it plays in a high violin-like range, it has a certain struggle to it.” Since Bran started wandering, having parted from his family, Djawadi said, he’s been accompanied by the Starks’ theme, “a really lonely, emotional theme,” played on a solo violin.

Wright hasn’t always loved classical music. “I started playing piano six years ago,” he said. “I loathed it to begin with. There was a bit of sheet music for ‘Zadok the Priest’ ”—Handel’s coronation anthem—“hanging around, and I thought, Let me have a go at this, and discovered I could play it, and I thought, Oh, let’s try other hard pieces. Now I’m an absolute obsessive. I’ve been through lots of musical phases. Dance music, punk—Stiff Little Fingers, Wayne County & the Electric Chairs. Now I love the Romantic era. My absolute favorite is Liszt, and Rachmaninoff.” He’d struggled while listening to the Lannisters’ theme, having recently rewatched the Red Wedding scene at an event in Toronto. “It was so gruesome—really sort of awful,” he said, cringing. “The music contributes so much to that.”

At the première, at Avery Fisher Hall, the look was George R. R. Martin chic. There was a dragon on the red carpet. Wright wore a grid-pattern Vivienne Westwood jacket; his onscreen sister Arya (Maisie Williams) wore a dress dotted with white puffballs; her abductor, the Hound (Rory McCann), wore a kilt. Martin sat in front of Jack Gleeson, who plays Joffrey, the sadistic boy king. The Philharmonic, conducted by Djawadi, played the main title and “The Rains of Castamere.” The projector, at the back of the room, dampened the sound of the strings, but the crowd was enthusiastic. The cellos did their thing, and everyone survived. ♦

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